Aria (1987)

There are few films that have brought me as much pleasure as 1987's anthology of short cinematic wonders called Aria. I have repeatedly viewed the film: as an escape, as an elevation of the spirit, as a perfect and complete entertainment--it exemplifies all that the cinema is. Dream-like, surreal, a fantasia blending sound and image with utter and complete rapturous affection. To say that it is perfect is perhaps overstating things; but, only a little. It is damn near perfect.

It is the work of ten different directors, including Ken Russell, Robert Altman, Jean-Luc Godard, Nicolas Roeg, and Julien Temple; additionally, we have Charles Sturridge, Franc Roddam, Derek Jarman, and Bill Bryden, who helmed the wrap-around segment with John Hurt and Sophie Ward. Each segment is less than twenty minutes, and each is set to an operatic aria from such composers as Verdi, Wagner, Korngold, etc.

The film begins with the beautiful image of a cathedral tower set against purplish dawn; and then we see the dapper John Hurt, walking through the streets of an unidentified European city, a place with old-world architecture and a deeply beautiful visual appeal. Pigeons flutter at his feet as he solemnly goes into the cathedral to pray; perhaps to offer penance for whatever sins or indiscretions that have brought him here, as a spectacle for the audience.

"Un ballo in maschera" (A Masked Ball)

We are next treated to the image of a man, small, dark, trudging through the heavy snows of Vienna. The statue in the foreground gives us a sense of the age of the place, of the gravitas of his mission. He sits on a bench with his comrades, passing a newspaper announcing the arrival of King Zog of Albania, to romance a secret lover, a ravishingly beautiful woman. Here, King Zog himself is also portrayed by a woman with a phony mustache, actress Theresa Russell. He is seen reading the gossip accounts in the paper, sitting at his desk, and also, checking his weapon. (In reality, King Zog of Albania was said to have survived an amazing fifty or so attempts on his life by political opponents.)

Here he is comfortable with his lovely, and very elegant lady love (Stephanie Lane); but must feel the instinctive feeling that there may be lurking some unforeseen assassin in wait; the second sense of a man that has faced danger many times.

He is seen seated in his theater box, almost Lincoln-like, smoking a cigarette in a filter, surrounded on both sides by his adjutants or aides. The assassins are seen coming into position as below, the dancers whirl about the stage, their faces concealing their true selves, just as if they were themselves assassins...or body doubles.

King Zog begins his exit. The assassins arrive; shooting begins. We are treated to fast editing between the bloody gunfight, and the unmasking still preceding on the theater stage within. One dancer unmasks to reveal a face suspiciously like that of ...King Zog.

The assassins are seemingly killed. (In real life, they were arrested and served shockingly minor prison terms.) King Zog is unhurt but had the opportunity to draw his weapon and fire back at his attackers. The fact that Theresa Russell, a woman, was chosen to play the part of a man seems to suggest, slyly, that, perhaps, an impostor King Zog was substituted to lure the assassins out; likewise, the unmasked dancer that seems to so resemble him. However, this is mere fanciful speculation on our part.

The segment, directed by Nicolas Roeg, is set to the music of Guiseppi Verdi. The story of this particular assassination attempt on the life of King Zog is entirely true.

"La vergine degli angeli" (from La forza del destino)

Following this we have, also from an opera by Verdi, a quite moving, nearly haunting segment directed by Charles Sturridge. In it, three children in London--Nicola Swain, Jackson Kyle, Marianne McLaughlin--are seen leaving school, walking the streets, even seemingly camping around a fire in the woods or a yard. Very peculiar, but the director gives us an intro into the lives of these little scamps, into their strange world, which exists beyond the boundaries placed in their pathway by the adult world. For the few minutes they are under the camera lens, it is as if they are examined like another species of life.

As if to underscore their innocence, their virtuousness, one of them is seen offering devotions to a statue of the Blessed Virgin. Little faces are lit from below, by candles, by the dashboard lights, by the boring blue cathode-ray glare from the television. The voices of the soundtrack singers soar, making the faces of the children the cherub faces of ghostly little angels.

They steal a luxury car for a joyride, perhaps to experience the adult world they are barred from, perhaps as simply an affront to the bourgeois opulence it represents. (Does this ostentatious wealth offend the Virgin?) They set the thing on fire, and then watch the resultant news coverage on television; a child's fantasy prank, to be certain, the piece still has a very weighty, heavy, solemn undertone. The children seem as if their actions may be guided by forces higher than themselves.

Armide

The following short, directed by the legendary Jean-Luc Godard (who incidentally, as of this writing, is still alive at an amazing ninety years old) takes place in, of all places, a gymnasium. Here, muscle-bound hulks work out, completely oblivious to the two women, both ravishingly beautiful and both clad only in robes, cleaning the tables.

It's a surreal, dream-like, comic episode, and it is dream-like in the literal sense. One of the women (the actresses are identified as Valérie Allain and Marion Peterson) begins to shake her head while wiping a table, as if to try and shake herself free from an somnambulisitc reverie. Meanwhile, the men continue to pump iron, oblivious to the beautiful women in their midst.

They race about, inspect their breasts, pose nude as if they are Greek statuettes of goddesses, fellow physically perfect specimens, enshrined at the altar of narcissism. The ringing clatter of the metal weightlifting machines is an interesting counterpoint to the music, the women imitating a machine-like connection at one point, their heads pushed together side by side, one rising as if on a screw, to cry out in frustration, while the other dips mechanically. The parody of male and female relations, the traditional bourgeois subservience of the woman and the complete and total self-absorption of maleness, is not lost in this satirical piece of surrealism.

Finally, nude, the women produce a knife. The idea has come upon them to stab the oblivious male bodybuilders; the knife being a substitute penis, of course. The act of pulling the knife, then casting it aside is repeated, again and again, with the recurrence of a dream image--finally, we see the male and female heads once more, placed, like Greek statuary, Adonis dreams, Aphrodite-like specters of physical loveliness, timeless; contemplating everything and nothing.

Rigoletto

The next segment, "Rigoletto," directed by Julien Temple and set once again to Verdi (specific extracts include "Questa o quella", "Gualtier Maldè... caro nome", "La donna è mobile", and "Addio, addio") sees the late comedian Buck Henry married to actress Anita Morris (also deceased), about to depart for a "business trip"; he claims he is reluctant to leave his sick wife. He is apparently a big-time Hollywood producer. Morris, with the sniffles, is just as eager to see him go. It turns out they both have lovers, and they are both headed to the "Madonna Inn" for a little kinky hanky-panky. Of course, neither one realizes that they are both headed to the same resort trysting place, Henry going there with his Swedish girlfriend (Beverly D'Angelo) and Morris with a muscle-bound 1980s gym rat in fashionable workout attire (Garry Kasper).

Henry slips D'Angelo some ecstasy and Morris and her lover pull up and get themselves a room right next door. It becomes a comic farce of the two cheating spouses nearly missing each other by moments, while the camera swoops and pans drunkenly through the air, following the very high Henry around in a scene that would be mirrored over a decade later in Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

The strange, kinky sex acts of the two cheaters is videotaped, a' la courtesy of the establishment. So what's the rub, as Shakespeare would say? When the couples exit for home, they drop their baggage, and an errant parking lot attendant mixes them up, handing them each the wrong one. So, in the tradition of any great urban legend, when Henry and Morris look at the respective tapes, they realize what the other has been up to. But both are guilty, so what is there to do?

"Glück, das mir verblieb" (from Die tote Stadt)

Following "Rigoletto," we have, set in the Victorian city of Bruges, in Belgium, a beautiful but curiously cold vignette. Showing the empty, yet undeniably picturesque streets, it features a duet, the music composed by Erich Korngold. A man (Peter Finch) and his beloved (Elizabeth Hurley) are singing the praises of the dawn to each other in a stuffy, if ornate Victorian boudoir. The duo is impossibly handsome, their constricting costumes slowly stripped, as Hurley's full and sensual breasts are revealed. Their mounting, unreleased passion and ardor are contrasted with the cold, empty landscape of the ancient, crumbling city. Theirs is an eternal moment of communion, a point of revealing oneself as vulnerable and enthralled by the object of romantic desire.

Abaris ou les Boréades

Afterward, by contrast, we have a scene that might be worthy of Sade, considering he, in point fact, did direct plays in a lunatic asylum. Robert Altman helms a segment wherein Eighteenth-Century grotesques form the audience for an evening's operatic entertainment. Their clothing is tattered and stained, their faces bleak and frightening clown masks, reminding one vaguely of the three singers from Marat-Sade. There's a fair bit of bawdy tomfoolery, some flashing of breasts and buttocks, but generally, the feeling is one of bleak anarchy--the concept being that the inmates of the madhouse were, for therapeutic reasons, allowed to attend the theater before the "normal" people. Why? Charitable pity? Perhaps, it was felt they would give the most honest reviews? The music is several selections from Jean-Phillipe Rameau (specifically "Suite des vents", "Nuit redoutable! ... Lieu désolé", "Jouissons, jouissons! Jouissons de nos beaux ans).

"Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde

It is in the modern glitz and glamour, the cold-hearted electric opulence of Las Vegas that our next vignette unfolds. Bridget Fonda and her lover James Mathers roll down the center of the strip, taking in the sites, eyeing the icy, empty, because vacant and phony, wonderland. The dazzling lights and neon signs seem as sterile a fantasy of ostentatious wealth as any proffered by a fairy tale of paradise-like indulgence. Of course, it is all a ruse, a facade; a cheap hustle; a spider's lair to capture the human flies and flotsam that swirl around the roulette tables and one-armed bandits in hopes that maybe, just maybe, Fate will strike them just as sure as lightning with a financial windfall, a winner's streak; a jolt of pure love and luck from out the blue.

Alas, of course, it is too often the other way around--men and women become hooked, chained to the pedestal of gambling addiction, a vice that entirely consumes them. They keep spending, spending, spending until they are broke--always with the mad delusion that soon, very soon, their luck will turn; they'll lay down the proper numbers, or get the right combination on the slot machine--and finally WIN.

Fonda and Mathers come to Vegas, their first image of it the arrest of a Native American woman by a highway patrol--right away the hard fist beneath the velvet glove. They check into a hotel and proceed to make love. Two beautiful specimens, they repair to the bathtub where, in an act of fatal, desperate passion, they slit each other's wrists. It is a love-suicide, an offering on the altar of the city of phony dreams and capricious fate. Maybe it is an act of defiance, for all the phony glamour and charlatan sleaze that Vegas represents. At any rate, we see it is the end of their journey, their final, mad passionate act of denial of the world.

"Nessun dorma" from Turandot

Ken Russell directs the following film, an arresting visual feast set to the music of Puccini, a compelling, hallucinatory fantasy of a jewel- bedecked woman set among the clouds, with Nubian gods, (calling to mind ancient Egyptian deities), planting upon her skin rubies and sapphires and other glittering precious stones, while her skin is painted with bright swirls of color. The most striking initial image has her seemingly skating across the celestial ice, with the rings of Saturn placed about her neck. The images, commandeered and directed by the late cinematic provocateur, are visually arresting and surreal, and at the same time, call to mind the commercial images used to sell an idea or fantasy, upon which Russell cut his directorial teeth. The woman is exposed, in one peculiar vision, to simply be a mannequin head resting atop a glass countertop, possibly in a modern shopping center.

It is finally revealed that she is a bloodied woman experiencing or hallucinating under anesthesia, while a surgery is being performed on her after a fiery roadway accident. Happily, the woman survives. But, what could her vision of floating in the heavens with black gods possibly mean? Her salvation from the stultifying whiteness that treats her as a dissembled collection of false parts? The form of a dismembered department store mannequin? The bourgeois ideal of a white man's objectified lust? Is this a racial message of a white woman being "freed" from her middle class oppression? It is perhaps suggestive that the one who "saves" her battered, brutalized form is a white surgeon. He also gives her the gas that causes her mental hallucination of cosmic escape, her coronation as the "White Queen of the Heavens." There are layers of subtle meaning beneath the surface here to pick apart. (Or perhaps, it is simply as simple as the scenario implies, ALL surface. If so, the joke is on us.)

"Depuis le jour" from Louise

The final segment of Aria, directed by Derek Jarman to the music of Gustave Charpentier, depicts an aged crone at the center of a spotlight, on a brightly lit stage. Raining down around her are what seem to be paper flower petals. While she experiences this, dressed, like Mrs. Havisham, in what appears to be an old-fashioned wedding gown, she exalts, in one brief moment upon the stage of her life, where she is the eternal prima donna; her rapture is about a romance with a young boy, on a beach, decades ago. A moment in time, lost in time, but to her a supreme memory, one which preserves her in her withered, elderly state. It is a simple scene, yet transcendent and powerful; two kids in the surf, the greedy, longing memories of an old woman. However, not her sad memories, judging by the joy written across her withered features. This memory is her "moment in the sun," a timeless memory of romantic rapture. That we should all have such moments before we go.

"Vesti la giubba" from Pagliacci

Lastly, we come full circle. John Hurt is seen in a long-deserted opera dressing room in front of a mirror. He is smoking, a habit that causes him to wheeze and cough a bit. He has previously doffed his white hat by throwing it from the stage to the balcony. There it is caught by The Woman--she makes her odd appearances as a memory, or a ghost. Beautiful, she's a haunting phantom before which he must perform.

Finally, dressed fully as a clown, Hurt goes out to center stage--miming Caruso to an empty theater, the audience, the ghosts of his mind. The only spectator, of course, is The Woman. Who is she, or was she? A phantom of the past? Did he love her? Betray her? Did she leave him? Did she die? Is she a fantasy? Is she really the "Opera Ghost"? Who, in this dream world, can say?

Hurt mimes an aria from a scratchy cylinder of Pagliacci--the exact opera that King Zog was leaving when his would-be assassins accosted him. The composition, looking down as the Ghost Woman is from the balcony, is that of a clown painting from a dust bin, or a second-hand store. It is a generic image of a lone clown on a stage, next to a drum. His exaltation finally causing him to have a heart attack, he falls over; we presume, he is dead.

His operatic singing was nothing but a recording,a pale imitation; his evoking of a long-lost fantasy. But all dream and all memory is a recording; a fantasy. All music lives in our memories, in the neural synapses of our subconscious, submerged in the same fashion; waiting.

The final scenes are a re-cap, excerpts from the preceding segments.

The film was nominated for the Palme D'Or at Cannes that year; it didn't win. Criticized heavily, it was given a gentler nod by the late film critic Roger Ebert who declared it,"The first MTV version of opera." Regardless, it is a superb and total entertainment, an auditory and visual feast, a comedic dream, as well as a paen to the longing that exists in the human soul, elevated by the human voice, and given praise in timeless, glorious, MUSIC.

Let us escape; let us dream.